


Arch

by KarkaHatchlings



Series: Guild Wars 2 Interstitial [16]
Category: Guild Wars 2 (Video Game), Guild Wars Series (Video Games)
Genre: Conversations, Explosions, Gen, Magic, Slice of Life, Sneaking, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 15:27:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16621604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KarkaHatchlings/pseuds/KarkaHatchlings
Summary: A pause in the fighting during the destruction of Lion's Arch.





	Arch

Another gout of vapor and spray shot above the line of shattered homes along the shore.  The underlying screech of metal signaled the enormous drill encountering a new strata of stone beneath the bay.  After a moment the intensity of the noise receded into the background of the dying city’s paroxysms.

Pale blue eyes peered up through the haze of miasmic gasses and smoke at the monstrous device suspended above the water.  It was only a glance, not enough to begin to understand the thing’s magnitude, before the onlooker was forced back under the shelter of a leaning wall.  An airship swooped low, hunting survivors. When it fired a cannon broadside at something on the cliffs to the east displaced air pummeled the man in his hiding place.

Hunkered down in the shade and obscured from above, Charter’s only company was an aetherblade patrol that had come on him as he picked his way through the wreckage of the Western Ward.  He was still panting from the fight, now minutes gone, dragging gasps of air into burning lungs through the stained mask over his mouth and nose. The corsairs, of course, were not breathing at all.

A gesture that looked to pluck at his mask instead raised a pistol and Charter turned with the weapon ready.  At his back was a crouched figure draped in long, ragged leathers. “It would have been too slow,” the newcomer’s own pistol, a fat-barreled charr design, rested on a knee, barely pointed in the human’s general direction.

Charter jammed his gun back into his belt.  “You’re going to get killed doing that,” he growled the admonishment as if speaking to a balky child.

“Maybe not before you’re killed daydreaming,” Neraric’s glowing eyes twinkled insolent and silver in the shade of his hood.  He slid a narrow-bladed knife, as slender as the pistol was fat, from a sleeve and prodded one of the blue-clad and bloodied corpses.

Still catching his breath, Charter didn’t answer.  This damnable gas! He watched as the sylvari lifted the hem of the pirate’s shrapnel-tattered coat to reveal a turned-out inner pocket.  The point of the blade drifted over a discarded sack nearby, as limp and deflated as its former owner. Neraric met his gaze and raised a grey, mossy eyebrow.  “Find anything good?”

The reply was in kind.  “Have you seen the others?” 

When the lean sylvari stood, he broke eye contact and looked out from their hiding place.  “Some of them were in Postern Ward.” His dubious tone, coupled with the flames rising above Deverol Island, suggested he didn’t think that was true anymore.  “While the charr were tagging along with the 14th Lionguard at the Plaza.”

The other man said nothing and waited.  “Oh, and I think Pleek and Biwt have been trying to evacuate the lighthouse all morning,” Neraric added, an apparent afterthought, and Charter’s shoulders dipped minutely in relief.

Knurled bark at the corners of the sylvari’s wood-slit mouth bent in self-satisfaction when Charter joined him at the edge of the sheltering wall.  Thrust up through the green-tinged smoke, the lighthouse was visible, madly flashing a warning back at the entrance to the bay.

The southern shore held the human’s attention until the whirring approach of another airship forced him back again.  It was cruising low enough that the goggled corsairs leaning over the gunwales were in sharp detail against the red of the skull-decorated lift bag.  The sylvari was suddenly nowhere to be found.

“Is there something wrong,” asked Neraric ingenuously, “that you’re not with her?”  He reappeared, impossibly, from behind a small clump of drifting smoke.

Breezy innocence on the sylvari’s part was all that met Charter’s flat glare.  “We each have our own goals.” The measured nonchalance of his words was strained.

“But they converge?”

“Sometimes more than others.”

The answer seemed to satisfy Neraric, but only for a moment.  He took a careful cranelike step over one of the bodies, then turned on his heel.  The tail of his long duster fluttered outward with the movement. “I don’t see it. You both hold this guild together, yes.  But there doesn’t seem to be common ground.” His tone was still easy, conversational. “You’re quiet, thinking more than speaking.  She’s straightforward, lets everyone know her opinion, is half your height…”

“What would you know about this sort of thing?” interrupted the human before any further points could be listed. The question was pointed, despite how Charter’s attention had shifted back to the mortally wounded city beyond their makeshift blind.

The square shoulders of the sylvari’s coat rolled in a shrug.  “I wasn’t quite born yesterday.” He straightened his tall collar with a jaunty snap.  “And out in the Mistwar people come together. There’s shared hardship, simple celebration of surviving, even, hm, experimentation with something different.”  A laugh like creaking branches escaped him before ending in a wet and ragged cough. The choking fog was no better for plants than anyone else. He dragged the back of his hand across his lipless, wooden mouth, but a shallow crescent of smile remained, bolstered by pleasant memory.

A staggering chain of explosions near the waterfront shook the ground.  Both men covered their heads as dust and splinters then loose planking shivered down from the wall hiding them.  On the heels of the blast the lightning crackle of aetherblades deploying filled the air, close enough to pick out in the pandemonium.  Charter checked his pistol and hefted the weapon. The other’s sword was already unsheathed, but he draped the tail of his coat over its polished blade.

Stone skittered across stone.  Tramping feet and low, accented curses pressed the pair deeper into cover.  Charter’s throat and lungs burned with miasma but he kept any cough smothered under his mask.  Jagged lumps of brick and broken spars jabbed at his back as he shrank against them, away from the open street.  

A slight movement stirred the sleeve Neraric’s free hand was hidden in and textureless black billowed out of the collar of his coat.  Unfurling, it blanketed the rubble to sink in and deepen the shadow in each crevice. The white glow leaking from his eyes and beneath the bark of his face faded out last of all and to any outside observer, there was only firelight-fanned shadow beneath the collapsed wall.  

Ducked low to clear the cloth-strip crest of his helmet, a norn face half hidden under beard and goggles peered in from the street.  The aetherblade took one look at his dead fellows, spat, and withdrew. Unintelligible growled orders. Boots on broken masonry. Agonizingly slow, the sounds of immediate danger moved on.  Shadows fled from the smoke-tinged sunlight and revealed the two men once more.

“Toward the Black Lion,” Neraric whispered.  With his toe, he turned over the fragment of cobblestone the pirate’s spit had struck.  It was less than a handspan from his foot.

It was his turn to be surprised, however, when his human counterpart spoke.  “I like her looks. I like being with someone you’d not find in the Reach or Settlement.”  Rough and low, Charter’s voice was the sound of someone creeping over loose ground.

“And she knows what a person should do, isn’t afraid to say so,” the leather mask hiding his mouth and nose wrinkled with the exhaled words.  “That’s good to have sometimes.”

“Hm,” Neraric nodded in acknowledgement.

The human crawled forward and crouched at the edge of concealment, “now, we need to clear out.”

A grey-green finger pointed past him to the north.  “I know of a cache of loot they piled up in White Crane.  Would need help to get through the patrols, however.” It was an offer, despite the sylvari’s casual phrasing.

“Then let’s go.”

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in /gw2g/.
> 
> Events and locations referenced here correspond to in-game events and locations: the invasion of Lion's Arch by Scarlet Briar. Locations and units referenced describe the movement and public events during the evacuation event.


End file.
